Neon Screams

by Kit Mackintosh

  For a while these genres were simply audible thought-experiments for a niche pocket of music geeks. But as time went by their amorphous vaporscapes seeped out into the streets. They’d articulated something universal in the Internet age, something unavoidable. Soon street styles from all over the world would sound like the Cloud; music was plugging us into the immaterial matrix.

  Let’s Lurk

  There was a brilliant moment of confusion about the future of British music in the mid-2010s. Whole swathes of trap were being produced, all with an impulse to modernise in some way, but without yet formulating how to quite do so. You had groups such as Section Boyz releasing tracks like “Lock Arff” and “Section Music 2” with these dreamy, disembodied beats. But there was one rap collective, working with one auteur producer, who truly uncovered the uncanny: 67 and Carns Hill.

  On 67 tracks like “6GODS”, “Church”, “Today”, “WAPS”, “Dead Up”, “Hookahs”, “67k What Where?” and “Way Too Active”, Carns Hill makes you feel as though you’re phasing in and out of physical existence. Choral samples stutter. Murmuring instrumentation gets mangled like an alien broadcast being battered as it travels through an asteroid field. Oriental string plucks get caught in cosmic storms. Nothing’s at ease in Carns’ productions, there’s no ontological certainty — everything’s evaporating and disintegrating through digital effects only to reconfigure again in the next second. Often Carns Hill just presents you with this Dada collage of unrelated noise — non-sequitur slabs of sound smashed back-to-back with one another with no sense of narrative or emotional cohesion.

  Rocket-launch control-room chatter is sampled by Carns as his producer tag and his music does indeed situate you in the vacuum of space. It’s expansive and empty, at once awe-inspiring and horrifying in how desolate it sounds. The music he made is just wonderful nothingness.

  The evocations of rocket launches in Carns’ tracks harken back to an old futurism. It has a similar spacey sensibility you’d find in rave tracks like Acen’s “Trip to the Moon”, for example. Like the UK drill that his sound would give birth to, Carns’ beats are striking in that they were at once at odds with the current Auto-Tuned musical futurism and yet not at all retro sounding. Carns Hill’s production existed in its own parallel sound universe, what was exciting about it couldn’t really be analysed through the lens of musical lineage or progress. It was unique on its own terms, an isolated blip in our cultural slipstream. One that cemented solipsism as the sound of Now.

  UK DRILL

  British street music has a special genius for identifying an entire world of latent sonic possibilities within the work of a maverick producer from abroad or even a single isolated track that passed by almost unnoticed in its country of origin. UK garage is a prime example of this syndrome of making an import record… important. It was an entire homegrown genre that owed a huge proportion of its rhythmic and production DNA to the string of vocal cut-up tracks by New Jersey garage outsider Todd Edwards and to the unusual grooves of two specific Chicago house records: Roy Davis Jr.’s “Gabriel”’ and the Kelly G Bump N Go mix of Tina Moore’s “Never Let You Go”. Both tracks abandoned the standard four-to-the-floor pump of house for skippy, syncopated grooves. These tracks, rhythmic novelties that inspired no offspring in America, became genuine innovations in the UK where their ideas were adopted (sub) culture-wide. “Gabriel” and the Bump N Go remix helped to spawn 2step garage, which moved from the pirate radio underground to become the UK’s dominant form of Top 40 pop music around the turn of the millennium. The same process happened two decades later with the emergence of UK drill.

  Chicago drill — a gritty style of gangsta trap — had originated at the turn of the 2010s and appealed to road rappers for obvious reasons; the two genres were similar in terms of their criminal lyrics and DIY hood music videos. While most Chicago drill drum programming fit comfortably within the trap formula, there were a number of more rhythmically ambitious tracks in the early 2010s — G Herbo x Lil Bibby’s “Kill Shit”, Lil Herb’s “Gangway”, Prince Dre’s “Homie” — that would in a few years prove way more influential in London than in their native city. Of these, Lil Bibby’s “How We Move” and King Lil Jay’s “Bars of Clout” were particularly crucial in the development of the British variant of drill, having seemingly been the respective blueprints for 67’s pioneering UK drill tracks “Add a K” and “Outside” from 2014.

  The reason why these atypical Chicago drill tunes caught the ears of London listeners and proved to be far more generative in the UK than back home is that they tapped into a collective rhythmic sensibility — derived ultimately from bashment — that was already attuned to and predisposed towards angularity and asymmetric drum patterns. Although originating from completely outside the London narrative of jungle > 2step > garage > grime > UK funky, they somehow felt part of it; it’s as if Britain had a kind of audio post-traumatic stress disorder and Chicago drill was the fireworks that triggered all these flashbacks of ‘Nam. As UK drill coalesced in the mid-2010s, the folk memory of those pirate radio sounds could be detected as a ghostly presence, in the rhythms, bass shapes, textures, moods and vocal cadences, even though few of the producers and MCs were old enough to have listened to 2step stations like Ice FM, let alone 1990s jungle pirates like Kool FM and Don FM.

  With their 2015 tracks “Civilians” and “Came in da Room”, 410’s BT and Rendo cemented UK drill as a style in its own right. It no longer sounded like an aping of its Chicago namesake, its soundscapes — these thick mists of mournful reverb — were unlike anything coming out of the US. After a decade in the wilderness, UK music had truly found its voice again.

  BROOKLYN DRILL

  Rather than flattening out music into a universal Benetton-like mush, one curious by-product of the web’s global reach is that it has enabled incredibly localised sounds, oriented to the very specific and parochial needs of their originating communities, to find audiences in far-flung corners of the globe. The hipster discovery of footwork, a dance-battle soundtrack specific to the housing projects of Chicago, is one example of this syndrome. Drill turned out to be another. It started with the heisting of a name (and little else, overall) from another Chicago ghetto sound and seeded a mutant version of itself in London. But in a further Internet-affected convolution, the UK’s take on the Chicago drill has ended up being a more significant transmission vector than the original sound.

  Brooklyn drill has been the best of the genres that have built upon UK drill. The borough’s hip-hop fans almost literally stumbled upon UK drill through a mechanism of music discovery that characterises online life. When up-and-coming producers upload instrumentals to streaming services, they’ll attract viewers and potential collaborators by including the name of a genre or of a famous artist and adding the phrase “type beat” after it. A producer who made a beat that they could imagine (more like, fantasise wildly) being used by Young Thug would title it “Young Thug Type Beat”. This was how Brooklyn rappers first discovered UK drill instrumentals: looking for “drill type” beats on YouTube and Soundcloud, they would find not just Chief Keef wannabes but UK drill uploads. To this day, most Brooklyn drill MCs use instrumentals created by UK producers (AXL Beats being the most successful of these). In some cases, they’re instrumentals that have already been used by UK drill artists.

  Brooklyn’s demography makes it particularly predisposed to UK drill. Historically, rappers from Brooklyn — whether Das EFX, Busta Rymes, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Fu-Schnickens or Desiigner — have all had clear Jamaican influences. Their styles were more melodic than other East Coast rappers of their era, recalling the half-rapping, half-singing Jamaican style known as singjaying, which can be traced back through dancehall’s decades-long history. Moreover, these rappers had a penchant for vocal novelty and phonetic preposterousness of the kind far more historically prevalent in bashment than in US hip-hop. Brooklyn has a large Caribbean population, so it makes sense that the dancehall approach to vocals feels natural t
o MCs from the area. That in turn also makes them responsive to the dancehall-descended rhythms within UK drill to a greater extent than most American rappers.

  The bass fetish in UK drill, descended from the transplanted Jamaican sound system culture, also naturally appeals to Brooklynites. Pop Smoke’s “Welcome to the Party” — Brooklyn drill’s first anthem to crossover outside of New York itself — features a coiling, boa constrictor bassline that sounds ready to wrap around your neck. It’s nasty, snarling, mean, menacing and also unlike the usual bass booms you get in American trap; it’s actually more reminiscent of both the north of England bassline scene and Wiley’s Eski bass. Listening to G Banga x Maine Finsesse’s “EBK” as a UK listener feels even more uncannily close to home. At 0.42, amid the track’s pensive gothic choir chants, a techier bass tone — reminiscent of the kind of sounds found in Ed Rush & Optical’s 1998 drum and bass track “Wormhole” — is introduced that barks and growls like a bionic hound.

  Even in its early iterations, Brooklyn drill diverged from its British counterpart in the kind of rapping heard in its tracks. For starters, unlike in UK drill, Brooklyn rappers are brimming with character; every verse feels a like potential audition for a major label or an influential radio show. Their voices reach out and grab you, you can almost hear a spotlight on them. Brooklyn drillers also ditch the “carni flows” so central to London rappers, instead relying on “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” bouncing triplet flows (in which beats are divided into threes instead of the usual two and four) that took over trap in 2010s.

  More electrifying, though, are the hyper-fragmented styles of Brooklyn rappers. Take OMB Jay Dee x Jadee’57’s “Run It”. A dizzying, frenzied whirlwind of manic excitement, it’s as if a frag rap track and UK drill track have been thrown into a blender whirring at full force. Rattling drums and discombobulated ad libs chase each other round and round like a Tom & Jerry episode in which both the cat and mouse have both been possessed by the tornado spirit of Tasmanian Devil.

  Fivio Foreign is the most fraggy of Brooklyn drill’s frag rappers who are taking the style to new diffuse extremes. On tracks like “Big Drip” Fivio doesn’t really rap, he just tosses out random rhythmic scraps and lyrical non-sequiturs bubbling with boyish charisma. His whole style is built around offhanded, one-off proclamations intermittently scattered between large stretches of him yelling “aye!”, “grr!” and “bow!” a number of times. It’s difficult to decide if what he’s doing is actually quite nuanced and rhythmically sophisticated — there may be a real art to toying with people’s attention like that, to knowing so much about giving so little — or if what you’re listening to is the dumbest music you’ve ever heard. Even if it is actually quite clever, its appeal stems from the impression it gives of joyous idiocy. Either way — smart or daft — it’s brilliantly entertaining. After listening to Fivio’s tracks you spend the next hour yelling “BOW! BOW!” at anyone within earshot. You really do have to admire his audacity; he’s made a successful rap career for himself pretty much just by yelling “aye!” a lot.

  Traditionally, “biters” — MCs who copy other MCs signature flows — are among the most reviled figures in rap lore alongside playa-haters, gold-diggers, and snitches. But a funny thing happened in the 2010s: biting became normalised, an acceptable and even celebrated practice. One example of this is widespread adoption of the triplets-based “Migos flow”; another is the profusion of performers who very explicitly modelled themselves on Young Thug. This kind of blatant and unashamed clonework can be heard in the tracks where Fivio Foreign collaborates with other MCs. In “Demons & Goblins” and “Move Like a Boss”, Fivio teams up respectively with Young MA and Meek Mill, two rappers who normally stand out as “proper rappers” in an era when the lunatics of mumble and frag rap have taken over the asylum. Eerily, both featured guests ditch their own trademark styles and essentially do a Fivio impression during their verses. The online hivemind — from which Brooklyn drill itself emerged — has made ideas far more mimetic (or should that be meme-etic) in rap than they were in the past.

  Another big difference between the Brooklyn artists and their British correlates is that the former have embraced Auto-Tune just like their other rap compatriots. Conversely, UK drill performers very rarely utilise pitch-correcting effects; they’re just too fantastical-sounding for the stoic rappers of south London. Brooklyn driller Smoove L sounds like a frail, yearning chipmunk on “OUU AHH ‘3 Wordz’”. He uses Auto-Tune to play up the fragility of the instrumental track, which is woven of spare piano chords, caressing it with tender melodies that are both sensual and swoon sorrow. In contrast, “TM Shit” by Masio Gunz deploys the effect for a completely opposite purpose: rendering himself as cold and inhuman as the ultra-digital instrumental, which is built around a rapidly fluttering sound that seems like it’s pixilating. Auto-Tune’s cyborg aura enables Gunz to project a man-machine feeling of gang nihilism.

  Pop Smoke’s album Meet the Woo 2 was important because it coalesced these varying strands of Brooklyn drill vocals — the characterful charisma, the fragmentation, the Auto-Tune — and coupled them with a new, grandiose orchestral flavours. It, more than any other Brooklyn drill, offered listeners a listening experience that was completely different from that found in UK drill.

  In its short time in the international spotlight, Brooklyn drill has already inspired Jamaican takes on drill from the likes of Vybz Kartel and Skillibeng. The genre is a virus, spreading from host country to host country. We’ll wait and see; Brooklyn drill may have just made it a global pandemic.

  GULLY VS. GAZA-ERA BASHMENT

  Pre-Gaza Peacetime

  The weird thing about the eruption of animosity between the Gully and Gaza camps at the turn of the 2010s was that it was such an abrupt gearshift from where bashment had been just a few years before. Up to that point the genre had been experiencing huge — possibly unprecedented — levels of global commercial success. In the early 2000s, artists such as Sean Paul and Elephant Man were household names around the world, while the genre more broadly was clearly influencing internationally famous American producers like Timbaland, the Neptunes and Scott Storch. During this era bashment was optimistic and outward-facing, not at all bogged down by the kind of internecine infighting that’d lose the ear of much of its international audience later in the decade.

  The genre had kicked off the new millennium by embracing a kind of cyber chic that permeated almost every aspect of the zeitgeist during the dot com bubble in everything from The Matrix to Digimon. By being the first to come up with a new style of synthetic-sounding street music that suited the mood of this new computer era, Jamaican producers outdid their counterparts in the UK and the USA. Before the synthesiser-led styles of grime or crunk had even been born, bashment producers were making a kind of digitised dancehall full of blipping synth percussion and computerised noises; Elephant Man’s “2000 Began”, Cobra’s “Tek Dat”, Sizzla’s “Woman Dem a Fi Mi”, Capleton’s “Who Dem”.

  It didn’t take long though for this techy phase of dot com dancehall to make way for a more “world music”-inspired sound that mirrored bashment’s world-conquering success at the time. You had tracks like Elephant Man’s “Fuck U Sign” from 2003, which combined clattering djembe percussion and crab claw clicks with a swivel-eyed Indian flute motif, and his track “Whining Machine” from the following year, built out of menacing brass stabs, a devilish steel drum melody and a coyote-call Asian woodwind riff.

  But even back then you could hear a new bashment emerging. T.O.K. and Sizzla were already having a go with Auto-Tune in their respective tracks “Gal Yuh a Lead” and “Pretty Girls”. Vybz Kartel was ascendant, rising to fame with tracks like “Sweet to the Belly” and making a name for himself by attacking Ninjaman onstage. Things were changing. War was in the air.

  A Serious War

  Vybz Kartel and Mavado… that was a serious war, like if someone kill your brother and you decide to kill back the whole family. It was a serious thi
ng… man a fire shot pon each other…

  — Beenie Man, VLADTV Interview

  2004 saw the release of Daseca’s Anger Management Riddim; an instrumental compilation that perfectly encapsulated the sense of elevating conflict within bashment at the time with its ever-ascending, tension-ratcheting string motif and ballistic drum fills (go listen to Elephant Man’s “Dirt Bed” to get the full frenzying effect). But the riddim was also a foreboding showcase for Vybz Kartel; from all the vocal tracks on the riddim’s official compilation CD, Kartel alone voiced a third of them, indicating to the world that he was shameless and unremitting in his desire to dominate dancehall.

  Anger Management ushered in a new era of orchestral tempestuousness and visceral physicality in late-2000s bashment production, later to be heard in riddims like Teetimus, David and Linton “TJ” White’s “The Book of Revelation” evoking “The Beast Riddim”, Daseca’s “Sixteen Riddim” and NotNice’s absolutely chilling “Boxing Day Riddim”. These instrumentals, and so many others like them, proved to be the perfect backdrop to the larger-than-life conflict that engulfed bashment at the end of the decade.

  So, how did the Gully vs. Gaza war start? Well, Vybz Kartel and Mavado had both come up under Bounty Killer as members of his group the Alliance, but Kartel broke away from the group in 2006 to establish himself in his own right. On the face of it, the battle was about loyalty to Bounty Killer, but soon it transcended that and became a vector through which a whole culture war erupted in Jamaica.